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In our Nellore district on the Coromandel Coast there is a seaside bird sanctuary at a place called Nelapattu. It was thriving till the other day but is now under the usual threat of 'development'.
Milk-white birds that we called Kongas used to flock there every breeding season which was all seasons except peak summer. They may be Siberian cranes, storks, pelicans, or whatever...we didn't know the difference nor cared; and when I asked Father what they are called in English, he simply said, 'cranes'.
Google now tells me they are flamingos...a lovely word that I first read in Alice in Wonderland much later.
So we used to often see flocks of these birds flying in their famous V-formation in our dark blue evening skies in the rainy season. The contrast between the white cranes and the blue sky remains etched in my memory till now.
Whenever a shout went up:
"Konga Konga Konga"
all kids stopped their play and looked up and everyone stretched their tiny hands towards the flock of cranes so that the back of their palms faced the the flock, and sang:
"Konga Konga Gollu Kokkiraye Gollu"
whose literal translation is beyond me and my Father.
In short it was an invocation to the cranes to bless us, and after the flock vanished from view, every kid would inspect his finger nails. And the symptom that the select few were indeed blessed was that their finger nails turned milk white...as white as the wings of the flying birds.
Some strange rite which must have vanished like the threatened flamingos...in any case Muthukur skies are no longer blue...they are dust-white when they are not coal-black.
And my finger nails always stayed brick-red and as usual I cried buckets...till one evening my MD Uncle was on a fly-by visit to our village.
As soon as he saw my mom (who was pregnant in her sixth innings), he asked her to come close to him and pushed her lower eyelid down and sighed:
"Hmm!"
And then he asked her to stretch her palm towards him and pressed her milk-white finger nails and pronounced:
"You are seriously anemic"
And then it was the turn of everyone in the family to run towards him extending their fingers to him. After examining them he declared:
"Prabhakar (that's me) has lovely finger nails...they are as red as carrots"
And it was my turn to gloat.
And he told my mom:
"Take two iron tablets everyday...morning and evening"
That of course fired my tender imagination.
Iron tablets!!!
And I started dreaming of how they would look, black or rusted or white, what shape the iron tablets came in and how one can swallow them and digest them and if they came in circles or spheres...the only tablets we knew were Aspro.
Much later I did meet an iron tablet at IIT KGP during my hostel days before a lady doctor married me.
Those days I used to frequently get what nowadays are known as viral fevers that lasted three days and vanished. But while they were going strong there would be high fever and shivers. Since I never wanted to miss a lecture class, I used to stock what were known as Codopyrin tablets which were very effective...the fever came down within ten minutes of taking one and returned only after three hours...enough to run back to the hostel and sleep off after the lecture went off.
One day however the fever didn't remit and I tried taking another tablet from the strip. It broke into two pieces and I discovered a broken iron nail joining the two halves. And then I examined the strip and it read:
"goodpyrin"
That was perhaps the beginning of the now-flourishing fake-tablet trade in India.
The other day there was this piquant news item that a Jain businessman while on his journey on the Delhi-Guwahati Rajdhani Express ordered a pure veg meal and it materialized in its own good time. And he was lustily feeding himself on the vegetable pulav till he discovered pieces of broken chicken legs in his veg dish.
He complained and the matter went up to the High Court (business being business).
After lengthy arguments the Court imposed a whopping fine of Rs 1 lakh on the vendor on rails.
The reason for the inordinate fine was not that the vendor supplied expensive chicken pulav instead of the much cheaper veg version, but that he brushed off the complaint of the businessman with a wave of his hand:
"The fault is yours...you ought to have examined your dish before eating it!"
Much can be said on both sides, I guess...
...Posted by Ishani
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In our Nellore district on the Coromandel Coast there is a seaside bird sanctuary at a place called Nelapattu. It was thriving till the other day but is now under the usual threat of 'development'.
Milk-white birds that we called Kongas used to flock there every breeding season which was all seasons except peak summer. They may be Siberian cranes, storks, pelicans, or whatever...we didn't know the difference nor cared; and when I asked Father what they are called in English, he simply said, 'cranes'.
Google now tells me they are flamingos...a lovely word that I first read in Alice in Wonderland much later.
So we used to often see flocks of these birds flying in their famous V-formation in our dark blue evening skies in the rainy season. The contrast between the white cranes and the blue sky remains etched in my memory till now.
Whenever a shout went up:
"Konga Konga Konga"
all kids stopped their play and looked up and everyone stretched their tiny hands towards the flock of cranes so that the back of their palms faced the the flock, and sang:
"Konga Konga Gollu Kokkiraye Gollu"
whose literal translation is beyond me and my Father.
In short it was an invocation to the cranes to bless us, and after the flock vanished from view, every kid would inspect his finger nails. And the symptom that the select few were indeed blessed was that their finger nails turned milk white...as white as the wings of the flying birds.
Some strange rite which must have vanished like the threatened flamingos...in any case Muthukur skies are no longer blue...they are dust-white when they are not coal-black.
And my finger nails always stayed brick-red and as usual I cried buckets...till one evening my MD Uncle was on a fly-by visit to our village.
As soon as he saw my mom (who was pregnant in her sixth innings), he asked her to come close to him and pushed her lower eyelid down and sighed:
"Hmm!"
And then he asked her to stretch her palm towards him and pressed her milk-white finger nails and pronounced:
"You are seriously anemic"
And then it was the turn of everyone in the family to run towards him extending their fingers to him. After examining them he declared:
"Prabhakar (that's me) has lovely finger nails...they are as red as carrots"
And it was my turn to gloat.
And he told my mom:
"Take two iron tablets everyday...morning and evening"
That of course fired my tender imagination.
Iron tablets!!!
And I started dreaming of how they would look, black or rusted or white, what shape the iron tablets came in and how one can swallow them and digest them and if they came in circles or spheres...the only tablets we knew were Aspro.
Much later I did meet an iron tablet at IIT KGP during my hostel days before a lady doctor married me.
Those days I used to frequently get what nowadays are known as viral fevers that lasted three days and vanished. But while they were going strong there would be high fever and shivers. Since I never wanted to miss a lecture class, I used to stock what were known as Codopyrin tablets which were very effective...the fever came down within ten minutes of taking one and returned only after three hours...enough to run back to the hostel and sleep off after the lecture went off.
One day however the fever didn't remit and I tried taking another tablet from the strip. It broke into two pieces and I discovered a broken iron nail joining the two halves. And then I examined the strip and it read:
"goodpyrin"
That was perhaps the beginning of the now-flourishing fake-tablet trade in India.
The other day there was this piquant news item that a Jain businessman while on his journey on the Delhi-Guwahati Rajdhani Express ordered a pure veg meal and it materialized in its own good time. And he was lustily feeding himself on the vegetable pulav till he discovered pieces of broken chicken legs in his veg dish.
He complained and the matter went up to the High Court (business being business).
After lengthy arguments the Court imposed a whopping fine of Rs 1 lakh on the vendor on rails.
The reason for the inordinate fine was not that the vendor supplied expensive chicken pulav instead of the much cheaper veg version, but that he brushed off the complaint of the businessman with a wave of his hand:
"The fault is yours...you ought to have examined your dish before eating it!"
Much can be said on both sides, I guess...
...Posted by Ishani
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